This process, argues Freud, is an inherent process of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such commandments are broken. Many of humankind's primitive instincts are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community.

The primary friction arises from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. In this seminal book, Freud enumerates his understanding of the fundamental tensions that exist between civilization and the individual. One of Freud s most intensely studied and influential books, Civilization and Its Discontents, takes the foundational principles of psychoanalysis and applies them to man and his place in society. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Wien, 1930.

Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents). Civilization and Its Discontents, Edited by: Strachey, J. For, apart from the personal moral distaste and condescension signaled by his inclination to regard it as an effort to bring about “the restoration of total narcissism” and by his association of it to trances, ecstasies, mysticism, and other “regressions to primordial states of mind,” he was quick to dismiss Roland's suggestion that the oceanic feeling had great scientific significance as a fundamental source of religious feeling ( Freud, 2005 Freud, S. Moreover, despite careful acknowledgment of his respect and esteem for Romain Rolland, who had brought the oceanic feeling to his attention, Freud was rather dismissive of this state of mind, both in terms of its moral value and its scientific importance. These pages, however, appear, at least at first glance, to have little relationship to the major themes dealt with in the rest of the book, and seem to have largely served as a means of linking Freud's analysis of the consoling functions of religion in The Future of an Illusion to the more general discussion in Civilization's second chapter of the “palliative measures” that help make human suffering more endurable ( Freud, 2005 Freud, S. ) as a college student sometime around 1963 or 1964, I can dimly recall focusing especially intently on the book's first few pages in which the “oceanic feeling” is discussed. Having first encountered Civilization and Its Discontents ( Freud, 2005 Freud, S.

Civilization and its discontents norton